Amina Bashir – Flashpoint

Why Nominated: Flashpoint analyst Amina Bashir is her company’s go-to subject-matter expert on the threat landscape of the Indian subcontinent. In her role, she has authored key research on the malicious use of chatbots, as well as vulnerabilities in the emerging wireless communications paradigm known as Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA).

Profile: As a member of Flashpoint’s global intelligence team, Bashir identifies, investigates and neutralizes advanced cyberthreats and malware, while supporting incident response efforts. She plays an instrumental role in FPCollab, an information-sharing community that equips Flashpoint’s customers and team members with timely insights on vulnerability exploits, law enforcement takedowns and data breaches.

Fluent in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Spanish, Bashir has developed an expertise in malicious cyber activity on the Indian subcontinent, including hacktivism threats and state-sponsored actors in the region.

In June 2018, Bashir’s research article, “Collaborative Adversarial Modeling for Spectrum Aware IoT Communications,” was featured at the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC). The article explores how DSA vulnerabilities and spectrum-sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks could potentially impact the performance of future 5G spectrum-aware IoT applications.

Bashir has also spearheaded research on chatbots, and how cybercriminals abuse the technology to steal personal or payment card information, or post offensive messages that could threaten the reputation of businesses. Her findings were published in an August 2018 edition of Global Banking & Finance Review.

What colleagues say: “Amina’s responsibilities include highly technical research and finished intelligence report writing; investigating and responding to customer risks and questions; establishing and refining complex, cross-departmental processes; and much more… She also has been involved in threat actor engagements with notorious top-tier cybercriminals, shedding light on their activities and tactics, techniques and procedures…”

“…I can confidently say we would have nowhere near the processes and collections capabilities without Amina. She designed and implemented a streamlined iteration of our collections process, enabling faster delivery of highly valuable data to some of the largest companies in the world.” – Steven Weinstein, director, threat research, Flashpoint